Occasionally I have a thought that I want to write into a file while I am at the terminal. I would want these notes all in the same file, just listed one after the other. I would also like a date / time tag on each one.

Is it possible to do this without having to open the file each time? Can I just enter it into the terminal and have it appended to the file each time with a command or script?

One day you'll be in such a hurry that you'll fumblefinger the >> and type > instead and blow away your file.

Emacs starts in five one-hundredths of a second on my Mac Mini. It takes a tenth of a second to start on a ten year old Celeron-based system I have sitting around. If you can't wait that long to start typing, then you're already a machine and don't need to take notes. :)

Depending on your needs, syslogd might be another tool to peruse. The command

theuser@tetrad:~$ logger This message is sent to syslog

will log the message with the facility user.notice. With many Linux systems this will be enough to have a file /var/log/user.log opened and appended to, with others you may need to define a handling for that facility and log level (or, whichever facility you choose - the local0 to local7 facilities are usually free to assign to things like this.

It's got the benefit of being able (aka configurable) to send notes from client machines to a central logging server, something I like to use for keeping track of administrative action since it preserves timestamp, user and host information automagically, while keeping actions in order.

Note: The ifdef is preprocessed with m4, on the machine with the hostname/hostalias "loghost", the messages will be logged to the file /var/log/diary, on all others, they will be sent to the remote syslog service at loghost. To test this kind of configuration, the config file can be sent through m4 for expansion (leave away the -D LOGHOST to see how it would look on a system not called loghost: